cduzz

Just to help me out a little; you're saying "printing press and electricity"

But there were printing presses before movable type, and movable type specifically allowed creation of inexpensive books and newspapers. The printing press itself wasn't all that useful alone.

Electricity (in the form of shocking fish) was used by people thousands of years ago and Volta was fiddling with electricity to make frog legs dance in the 1800s; electricity as an industrial property required a bunch of knowledge and material science to make ... lights and motors. Electricity by itself isn't all that wonderful; a flash in the pan so to speak.

So -- what "electric light" or "movable type" is the product of LLMs? I'm sure there are, but ELI5...

I can think of "Summarize this thing for me" and "Elaborate on this half baked idea" -- and honestly "summarize this for me" is actually quite useful. But I'm not sure it is "electric lights / electric appliances" or "indoor plumbing" degree of revolutionary.

I am planning on fiddling with using the TPM of an old dell 5820 I've got floating around my house as a budget HSM.

It looks possible, on paper, if you don't poke at it too often.

And I would have put the bearing shell over a pvc pipe and used a hand drill or just spun the drill bit between my fingers, assuming it is just bearing material.

Those kids (the autopian team) specialize in generating engagement doing things that are pretty unsafe...

Another example would be the dude who used a chainsaw on some lead acid batteries, for reasons.

https://www.theautopian.com/how-i-used-a-chainsaw-to-remove-...

That dude's also an owner of the company, so maybe giving himself lead poisoning for clicks is worth it?

DRAM is highly regular and relies on a 1T1C (one transistor, one capacitor) structure. Because those tiny capacitors naturally leak charge, the adjacent transistors must be optimized for ultra-low leakage. That requires thicker gate oxides and higher threshold voltages which makes them slow. Furthermore, digging those deep trench or stacked vertical capacitors requires highly specialized, high-aspect-ratio etching and deposition tools. Also, for DRAM the backend wiring is completely different; DRAM is a giant, uniform grid that only needs about 3–5 metal layers to keep costs rock-bottom while modern logic is highly irregular and complex, requiring 12–16+ metal layers.

Logic processes (CPUs/GPUs), on the other hand, are optimized for raw switching speed. They use thin gate oxides and low threshold voltages, which leak like a sieve. This is fine for a fast processor, but it would wipe out a DRAM cell's charge almost instantly.

Cisco has trained a generation of home-lab would-be cisco engineers to dig through shady russian forums to download sketchball binaries. I think they even hide the checksums of their gated binaries, just to make sure you're never sure how sketchy their code might be.

But in the one specific case of mobility express, you can ... just download it. Unexpected but actually pretty cool.

You still have to figure out installing and configuring it, which is mildly tedious, and you'll probably need one of those cisco serial cables, but it is an exciting side-quest instead of a dirty forum crawl.

To bring it back to "openwrt" -- this nonsense by cisco, broadcom, HP, IBM, etc is why generation after generation the "enterprise" market is dying -- they're excluding 90% of the would-be engineers from the job market protecting their e-waste from secondary or later reuse, likely just on the off-chance they might make a tiny amount of money downstream. But I guess that's not a line-item that shows up in the quarterly reports (what's the value of "community goodwill" ?)

I'm overall not a fan of Cisco; quite the opposite. There are lots of companies ahead of Cisco in the "pretty not so cool" these days so my ire is not as strong as it was when I was a young idealist.

As far as I can tell, in this one case (with mobility express) it seems like Cisco accidentally did something overall (IMO) "good" for the world by making it possible for their kit to be reused by some part of the world where someone will get utility out of the still very nice equipment and somehow cisco won't see a dime from that "someone is using cisco equipment" event.

Mobility express isn't perfect, but considering the cost of the gear and the cost of the license, it is pretty darned good. I suspect some product manager at cisco got fired for accidentally making the world not quite as bad a place as it could be if cisco extracted license fees on all the 2802, 3802, and 4800 access points or otherwise sent them to the e-waste bin 4 years early.

Thanks for the head's up! The Rukus Unleashed looks like the perfect replacement for my icky system.

I'll put in an ebay search notification for when the R650 (and R750) for $50 each and maybe it'll ding in a couple years and I'll be in a place to swap out the 3802 network I've got running now...

I didn't look at those; do they support running some controller thing in one of the APs to allow central management of all the nodes?

Cisco's mobility express just runs on one of the APs and can fail over to another of the APs; it's a slick piece of software.

And yes, it isn't open source, which is a real shame since cisco's killed it (as far as I can tell) and it probably represents an enormous and sophisticated investment in effort and engineering and it'll just melt into entropy.

I loath cisco and don't recommend their kit lightly. In this one case, they seem to have accidentally made (for my use case, running 5 APs at home) a perfect product. They're cheap, extremely reliable, my wife doesn't hate them (though mostly they're in the attic or basement; only one is visible), they've got a (relatively) easy to use UI that manages all of them at once, and (Except for the switch 2) they seem to just work even though I've got vlans and lots of SSIDs and other goofy stuff).

If I had a simpler house to support, I'd just get a single WRT capable "big fast" router / AP...

Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such.

That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features...

Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for.

It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones.

Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.

It is probably a combination of hitting a (low) cost and mimo; cisco makes pretty reasonable looking APs with lots of radios and decent coverage and they look like UFOs not alien spiders.

But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.

I have been extremely happy with cisco 3802 access points purchased on ebay for $25 each. Sure, it's only wifi5, but they're pretty solid and you can just deploy a swarm of them.

And they don't look fugly.

It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.

Oracle makes their money by promising the C Suite "give us money and we'll solve your problems." There aren't actually many companies in a position to credibly make that promise.

The oracle database is also actually pretty nice, according to the people I've talked to who use it.

But mostly they play in the 'nobody ever got fired for suggesting' club. These days AWS is the most egregious landlord of that club, but whatever.

I think the "party line" is that the goal shouldn't be "1950s grid, but bigger and with more red meat!"

Renewables actually cover a lot of the newer demand and can be put around where it doesn't require as much transmission capacity because the production is happening closer to the demand.

And frankly, these jumbo sized data centers can just go figure out how to power themselves. If they want to put PV and wind and some peaker plants on their campus and they can actually meet the environmental requirements, go to it. So far they seem to be dumping AI dioxin into the local waterways, but it is probably possible to run these things without grid power.

In my whole career I've seen computers getting smaller and more efficient. Sometimes you'd need more of them, especially if your product is growing, but almost never would you need these radical increases in power draw to keep up with the red queen.

In the past couple decades, the vast majority of electricity demands have gone down due to modern substitutions for things people want being way more efficient. People use LED / CFL bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs, heat pumps instead of resistive heating for water heaters and house heaters, etc.

People have also deployed lots of solar to their houses.

So by every normal measure, just by looking around outside and evaluating how I live my life, even with an electric car, my power demands have gone way down.

So the fact that there's some gooner class stroking AI and crypto coins out their network ports and making my electricity more expensive, well, yeah, I'd say that nonsense is lots of externalities that should be better managed.

What about running that same codebase on open source versions of mumps such as GT.M or Yottadb?

How do you think your code would do in GT.M or Yottadb? I understand both are open source (vs Cache).

Sorry; one final edit:

What you're describing is "bank" where the financial organizations settle transactions using a private media ("the crypto"); but each individual is still dealing with "a bank". In "crypto" you trust "the math" and you don't need to worry about the counterparty absconding with the money. In your scenario, the Argentine service provider is in a position where they trust "the app" not "the math"

Banking is fine; I'm okay with banking. Crypto is also fine, if you're doing one of the 3-4 things "crypto" is good at (mostly crime, but whatever).

But what you're describing is "bank, with settlement not using SWIFT"

Anyhow; my original statement is:

Which shitcoin or shitcoin network is "cryptocurrency" ? Do you mean you're just pushing fiat through stable coins into an exchange? Is the exchange even converting from one cryptothing to another? Are you just asking the peer to shovel bits into a some shitcoin address? If you're just putting fiat into an "exchange" and then pulling fiat out, congratulations, you've invented a pretty ordinary financial service.

You're not describing an actual financial exchange; you're making up some vague situation.

You're probably also breaking some laws around paying taxes unless someone's going out of their way to actually report these activities.

Regardless, please be specific about "pay via cryptocurrency" otherwise you may as well say "pay via paypal" or "pay via putting dollars into a bank of america account I keep open since I was a student abroad."

"cryptocurrency" is doing a lot of work here. I don't see where there's some magic "crypto ledger" in your getting paid for a service. Just an internet service that promises to transmit money from one place to another.

I think I offered a pretty concrete example of a real situation and how the imagined utility of crypto magic isn't actually all that helpful.

Now, perhaps what you're suggesting is "I've got millions of units of money that I've acquired through locally illegal means and I want to transport that money someplace else and I don't feel like renting a private airplane and diamonds up my prison wallet are uncomfortable and I don't want to pay taxes or otherwise explain why I have a brand new S class I paid cash for." then yes, I'll accept that there is some grey area where crypto has a place (to explicitly work around legal regimes I dislike, would like to degrade further, and don't feel like dealing with).

Can you describe a "society collapse" where your cold wallet _can_ get you out of trouble, and why that particular situation isn't subject to "I will shoot your corgi." coercion?

If you're dealing with a peer you can't trust (like the US government) that will ask for your passphrase and then not torture you for it if you refuse, I'd suggest you're not really in a situation where society has broken down.

Let's talk;

You're in Crimea right now. You want some gasoline. You have some magic numbers in your magic rock. It needs you to cast a spell to transmit those magic numbers to someone else. I guess it probably also needs ... some electricity and some network access and some time to make those magic numbers update in the gas station's magic number.

In what way is this actually going to help you in a total collapse? Let's stand around over my iphone and cold wallet and spacex terminal while we wait for things to beep the right number of beeps?

In the off-chance you find yourself in this situation, what's to stop the party with the gasoline from just pointing a gun at you or your corgi and asking you to add some zeros to the number of magic beans you're zapping into their magic number?

Now, perhaps you as an international agent of mystery, can use some shiny rocks or magic pieces of paper to make your escape, and you can then, once safely back in a stable society, use your magic numbers and spells to transfer "wealth" to some organization closer to your new physical location (let's say belize?) -- in which case, to avoid a bunch of tedious laws and such, perhaps that magic trick will work in the way you suggest.

But, when things go haywire and there's just Hobb's all against all, I'm not sure a magic cold wallet of certificates is going to do much.

People have made crazy stories up about "the origin of money" for a long time; Adam Smith makes up a zany story about people agreeing to use chunks of metal to make change for bartering because it's too hard to keep chickens in your wallet when you need to break a sheep[1]...

The notion that people gravitate to metal vs "fractional sheep" is without historical evidence. People in fact, a long time ago, did trade things like IOUs or pieces of broken reeds or sticks[2]. Those sticks acted like IOUs and were often traded around far past the original parties to the contract.

Money is a contract between you, your peer/counterparty, and whatever organization you "trust" to mediate if someone really isn't happy with the outcome of a situation.

Money is, indeed, culture.

[1] https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-iv-of-the-o... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

I feel like "open source" in this context is, as you say, an uncomfortable nuance; the tooling (llama.cpp, et al) is open but useless without weights.

The weights are extraordinarily expensive "capital" that is donated by big organizations who are all at war with each other.

I don't know that it will ever be possible for, for instance, archive.org, to make truly open weights. And, other than archive.org, I can't imagine any other "open source" organization (freebsd? apache?) being in any position at all to make truly open weights.

Maybe governments, government organizations, or universities.

None of whom are currently funded, mandated, inclined, or particularly interested in dumping the money into buying the infrastructure needed to make weights.

The localhost troll works better if you use the decimal representation of it:

http://2130706433

or any integer multiple of that 2130706433

These days I think "at night" is mostly covered or at least could be mostly covered both by wind and batteries.

The "base load" question may still be appropriate for deep winter, high (or low) latitudes, etc, but renewables are getting there pretty fast.

AI data centers that exist and are operational are running at maximum capacity. That's why you see things like the tiny little data center run by xai showing up as a valuable resource to xai (on the sale side) and anthropic (buy side). It is "only" 300 megawatts and there's a 1.25 billion rent on it per month.

If all these other data centers were anywhere near coming on line, that 300mw data center would be a rounding error not a line item as it is right now.

So someone's signed contracts for way more and way larger data centers, someone's purchased billions in hardware for these not yet operational data centers. I'm wondering how depreciation's going to work on all these assets...

Anyhow, I'm not really sure what "max capacity" is here, nor am I really aware when they're going to be delivering the operational assets that are currently levered to their eyeballs and consuming 1/3rd of the memory made on the planet.

As far as inference vs training, have new gotten radically better than old models or only marginally (at the cost of 10x or more the training costs)?

Very exciting stuff.

This is actually what happens.

I run my word processing software on my apple 2 (a total joke of a computer) instead of running it on the WANG.

I run my book keeping software on visicalc instead of the IBM.

I run my simulation software on my IBM PC (I even paid for the 8087!) instead of the VAX.

Moore's law has, at least so far, allowed the pioneers with toy computers to grow their toys big enough to solve "big boy" problems after some time has allowed the toy computers to be faster and the pioneers have scaled their crappy home-grown solution to solve their 60% of the problem that was originally solved by some enormous complex system.

Eventually the toy infrastructure gets expensive and solves 90-120% of the "big iron" problem space, but it also grows to cost as much as the big iron solution, but then a new generation of toy software and toy systems emerges to disrupt the "big iron" systems.

See also http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.htm...

High Bandwidth Memory uses thousands of interconnects for the data bus. DDR style memory typically uses in the neighborhood of 64 bit transfers at a time.

HBM tends to be integrated onto the package (board, multi chip module, die) because there are really tight signaling and wire routing constraints that make "modularity" impossible.

I remember back in the day you could get motherboards for your 286, 386, and sometimes even 486 with external L1 / L2 / L3 cache -- you'd buy a bunch of static ram dips that you'd populate sockets next to the CPU, and set a bios or DIP switch to enable it. These days that's just not practical because there are too many wires interconnecting the cache to the dies and cache coherence logic, and the speed of light is just too slow and electricity is too messy to put "external" to the die/chip/package, even if the packaging issues could be addressed.

HBM memory is similar -- it's not practical to make a generic interconnect that'd actually work reliably enough to provide field replaceable memory modules as you can with DDR style dimms.

EDIT:

Apparently I'm totally wrong in that these "SOCAMM2" modules have thousands of pads (like a CPU socket) and can in fact run with the same data bus width (1024 bits wide!) as "local" HBM. Very cool. And please ignore my out of date blatherings above. It's still not quite as fast as if you put the HBM in the package, but it's way faster than the DDR style setup.

They've got thunderbolt 5 which is pretty good and every port has a dedicated controller. You can even network macs together just over thunderbolt.

Not as fast as raw PCIe slots inside the chassis, but I don't think the ghost of steve jobs cares much. He'd tell you that if you've got no taste at all you can put his beautiful machine into ugly junk like from sonnettech and you can go do ugly things elsewhere.

I think apple's happy taking the market they've got and they'll leave the big guns HPC market to nvidia. The margins look great for nvidia right now, but I suspect nvidia's path will be similar to dram's boom/bust cycle more than apple's continuous "premium tool" brand's market positioning.

That 1tb / 12 channels is a continuous streaming read / write rates? I assume big wide DDR memory, for random "IO", is much slower than compared to HBM.

I feel like at a certain point there are just going to be big SOC packages with 128gb of ram and stacks of cores (each with their own "local" cache) and the 128gb "local" HBM on-package ram will just be the 4th or 5th level cache, and big server boards will have 4 of those and CXL elsewhere for "main" memory.

And things like the VAST stuff also blur lines between high speed local storage and less performant san or bulk commodity storage.

The old memory / storage hierarchies are getting mixed up (again).

Interesting times.